Delamere Road Handforth Cheshire SK9 3RB.
When is a pub not a pub?
Not at the moment in this instance, it would appear.
A residents group in Handforth is being blocked from converting a derelict pub into a community centre because of a 50-year-old rule.
The Spath Lane Residents Association wants to convert The Mermaid, in Delamere Road, into a facility for the community, but the group has been told the site must remain a pub.
As Mancunians were relocated from their homes in Ancoats and Hulme to Handforth in the 1960s and 1970s, it was agreed by Manchester City Council that the Mermaid would be built as a pub for the village’s new residents – and that it would stay that way.
So caught in a double bind – a pub that nobody wants remains un-let, the community resource required remains unrealised.
Meanwhile The Mermaid quietly falls apart, tinned up and seemingly unloved, from as far back as 2005:
A feisty group of Handforth pensioners, whose lives have been blighted by booze fuelled nuisance from their local pub, successfully blocked its application to open late. The group of five pensioners live near The Mermaid Pub on Delamere Road.
They said they have to live with fighting, loud music and antisocial behaviour spilling out of the pub onto their streets.
One man said: “The music from the pub is very, very loud and at times I have to compete with my TV against the volume of it.”
The Mermaid remains all washed up with nowhere to go.
Let’s take look at the forlorn walls, jagged eaves and faded signage.
Manchester's Estate Pubs 